


harbinger

by waldorph



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Mary Lives, Multi, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-05-05 01:20:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5355617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/pseuds/waldorph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is in her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't want to talk about the fact that I'm writing spn fic in ~~2015~~ 2016.

### 2020

There’s nothing really remarkable about it. It’s an old house, angry poltergeists, nothing they haven’t fought. And somewhere in the last fifteen years the omnipresent threat of death lurking around every corner lost its ability to scare him. It was all routine, and they’d survived three—four?— apocalypses. Angels and demons and monsters and knights of hell and destiny and Sam can remember when poltergeists were scary. Back when they were new to this, looking for Dad and fighting uphill to learn everything he should have taught them. Everything he should have prepared them for. 

And it’s so fucking stupid that Sam’s first thought is: Oh, he still has wings. Because Castiel’s wings are enormous and soot-black, sucking the faint light in and unkempt and wrapped around him and shaking. They’re shaking, and the water on the floor is trembling, rippling around him. The air is still wet and electric and Sam stops on the steps and thinks of course it was going to end like this.

Because in the center of Castiel’s wings, tucked inside that protective circle, is Dean.

“ _911 what’s your emergency?”_ the operator asks. 

“My brother’s been electrocuted in the basement of 452 Cherry Street, Greenfield,” Sam says, voice tight but steady. He watches Castiel’s hands, glowing faintly, moving over Dean’s chest. Castiel doesn’t have the grace to waste, but Sam’s not going to be the one to say it. “There was standing water and he’s non-responsive.”

_“Okay, I’m sending an ambulance now, they should be there in ten minutes. What’s your name, and can you get to your brother?”_ she asks. 

“Sam, and—yes,” Sam says. “Well—my brother-in-law can.” 

“Okay, Sam. Ask him if there’s a pulse.” 

“Pulse?” Sam asks, and Castiel shifts.

“Hello, Sam,” Death says from the top of the stairs. 

The phone drops into the water with a quiet splash and Sam turns around because Castiel doesn’t. 

“No,” Sam says, but he knows that—for all Death likes Dean, and he does, as much as an immortal, infinite being can like anyone Sam’s pretty sure Dean is Death’s _favorite_. 

“He’s had fourteen years longer than he should have,” Death says, walking down the stairs, past Sam and to Castiel, whose wings clench tighter, protective. 

Sam wants Castiel to rage. To challenge Death and tell him how that’s not fair. That a stupid poltergeist and electricity and a burst pipe in a fucking basement isn’t the thing that’s supposed to take Dean down. 

Death crouches and gently peels Castiel’s hands off of Dean’s body. Sam can’t—move. Death is so infinitely gentle, as he gathers Dean’s body to him, like a parent with a child, like Dean is precious and fragile, sliding him from the shelter of Castiel’s embrace, from the shadow of his wings. 

And then Death is gone, he’s taken Dean with him, and the ambulance is coming, and there’s no body. 

There’s only Sam and Castiel.

* * *

Sam puts up Dean’s stone stone next to Mom’s. Neither of them is in the ground, there, but he thinks Dean would have liked that. 

* * *

There’s no one to call. They’ve been successful, too good at what they do. No demons to deal with, no angels with enough juice. No deities willing to go up against Death. He’d found Wöden, who had looked amused to be summoned, golden-haired and square jawed. He’d even thought he could help, maybe. 

But when he found out Death had taken Dean—taken him personally, well. 

“There are greater things in the universe than you or I,” Wöden had told him gently. “There is no one who will help you with this, Sam. No one who can, or could.”

* * *

He and Castiel carve out a strange half-existence. Dean is everywhere in the bunker—the quilts he picked up at a church craft sale thrown over chairs, cupboard stocked with food he bought. Everything that makes the Bunker home came from Dean, and Sam—Dean had been so happy to make a home. Sam had never thought about how much it would hurt. 

Castiel spends days in their—in his—room. He curls up under the blankets and Sam knows what he’s doing. Knows that Dean’s scent is still there and Castiel is terrified of the day it isn’t anymore. When no matter how hard he presses his nose into the pillow or the mattress it’s gone. Sam knows because he has Dean’s jacket hanging in his closet and on nights when he can’t breathe around this clawing, hollowed-out feeling under his ribcage he hunches over it. 

Sam does things, though. Dean would kill him if he didn’t feed Castiel, so Sam brings him burgers, and when those go untouched Sam starts making double batches of his own food—vegetarian, because in that basement, under the smell of damp and electricity, had been the smell of cooked flesh.

Cas picks at the risottos and the casseroles that Sam mostly fails at—Dean cooked, after all, and in college there’d been the meal plan and then Jess and take-out and Sam hadn’t ever really bothered to learn. 

Sam takes calls and consults, pretends to be the FBI or local law enforcement or the ME or whatever else some idiot hunter needs him to pretend to be. 

He does it for three months. 

* * *

“There’s a way,” Castiel says from the doorway. Sam looks up from where he’s trying to salvage the congealed mess in the pan and takes it off the burner. “I can save you both.” 

“What?”

“I can go back,” he says. “I can go back to when Dean was born. I can stop Azazel and save your mother and make the apocalypse impossible.”

Castiel is dressed in one of Dean’s shirts, with one of Dean’s flannels draped over his sharp shoulders. 

Sam knew it was a mistake to watch the Terminator movies, he just hadn’t been able to articulate why when they’d been curled up on the couch, leaning against each other and staring hungrily at the screen. 

“When you sent Dean back, though, you were fully juiced.”

“That was sending someone else back,” Castiel says. “And monitoring him. And attempting to keep him out of trouble, letting him only change the hows of things, not the ultimate result. And then bringing him back, which is always the most difficult.” 

“What do you need?” Sam says. 

“Nothing, I should be…juiced…enough now,” Castiel says, flexing his shoulders. Sam thinks: of course that’s what he was doing. Castiel is a soldier, and an honorary Winchester: giving up isn’t in his playbook. “I am sorry I didn’t share the plan with you sooner,” he adds. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up if I was going to be unable to sufficiently…juice.” 

“Okay,” Sam says. 

* * *

The ritual is simple enough, blood and symbols. 

“Get the Colt,” Sam says as they’re painting them. “And Death’s ring.” 

“I know, Sam.” 

“And tell Mom to divorce Dad,” Sam says. “He’s a jerk and she deserves better.” 

“Your father was different before losing her.” 

“People don’t change that much,” Sam says seriously, because Dean used to say that too. That Dad was so different, and Sam thinks he probably was. He knows losing Jess made him lost but he had Dean, and Dad had had both of them. A good father would have—well. It doesn’t really matter what a good father might have done, because John Winchester wasn’t one, so it was a fucking moot point.

Castiel makes a considering face, tucking three angel blades into his jacket. They’re not sure what he’ll be able to take back with him. 

“Get Ruby’s knife,” Sam says. “And then kill Ruby.” 

“Ruby, Meg, Azazel, Lilith,” Castiel agrees. He pulls the cut on his palm open where it had started to clot. “Goodbye, Sam.” 

It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that Castiel is thousands of years old. That he was a soldier and that he fought his way through hell where all others failed. But as he places his hand on the wall and the light flares, burns through the Bunker and illuminates him, wings and all, Sam thinks that really, right now it’s not hard at all.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Her mother had had a miscarriage when Mary was eight. It had been a late-term miscarriage, and had devastated the entire house, all of them plummeted into brutal grief for someone they had never known, and now never would. Her parents had doubled down and taken her on a hunting trip, and Mary remembers, looking back, how the world had seemed so strange outside the car window. How there were parts of the country that were so flat it seemed like maybe the world actually _was_ flat, and then parts where there was no sky, no horizon, nothing but the smothering reach of mountain and forest. 

Mary had come back from that trip with gun callouses and a deep suspicion of the unknown, and, though she wouldn’t know this until later, the need to work out her problems through violence. 

It was as good an initiation as any—everyone knew that no one was a hunter without the bitter taste of grief stuck in their throats.

She hasn’t thought of that little brother who never was in years, until her OB/GYN asks, when she comes in for her pregnancy test, if there’s a history of miscarriage in her family.

She has spent her entire pregnancy fretting, going still for long stretches until she feels Dean flutter inside her. John doesn’t understand why she spends every trip to the doctor’s near tears, terrified, even as Dean kicked her kidneys, that once she was in the room Dr. Holton was going to tell her that there was something wrong: that she was imagining the kicks and flutters and pressure and that Dean was still and silent inside her. 

John thinks the angels she puts in the nursery are cute, and indulges, and Mary wants to turn in his arms and scream at him, and the drive to the hospital is full of her tears, and John’s worry that she’s in more pain than she is, and she doesn’t know how to articulate to him that some small part of her believes, fully and truly, that Dean won’t live through this.

Thirty hours of labor later and Dr. Holton is chuckling and saying, “Stubborn kid, you got there.”

Mary doesn’t claw his face off because the nurse—Ida, who was there when Mary checked in, went home, and now is back again—grips her hand and says, “Save the energy, sweetheart.” 

Still, Mary’s the one who’s been in labor for thirty hours trying to shove this kid out of her goddamn vagina, so she contents herself with snarling at him, baring her teeth. John would be appalled, but John isn’t allowed in, and it’s two more hours of pain before Dean comes into the world, strangely quiet. All of her fears come rushing back, the panic that he could be stillborn, that the umbilical cord strangled him or that somehow she smothered him as she was pushing him out. She’s already crying before she manages to get upright, and then he makes those strange unhappy-kitten noises as they wipe him off and clear out his nose, somewhere close to a cry but not quite.

"Is he okay?" she sobs, and Ida pats her hand, smoothing her hair back with gnarled fingers. Ida probably should have retired years ago, her face worn into fragile lines that deepen when she looks down at Mary reassuringly. 

"He's just one of the quiet ones,” she says, her voice thick with emotion. One of the younger nurses is teary-eyed, and sheepishly admits this was her first delivery as she wipes her red-rimmed eyes with the collar of her uniform, and Mary laughs, because this cocktail of fear and elation and endorphins and adrenaline and pure, unadulterated exhaustion make her feel like she could explode 

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” the nurse who’s weighing Dean says. “Mine all came out screaming and didn’t stop.” 

Eventually, they put him in her arms, and even though he’s red, and his face is strangely swollen and elastic, she thinks he favors her side of the family. That her mother would be delighted to lend her name to her grandson, and she feels a rushing kind of sadness that Dean will never meet his namesake. Samuel will never read the Hobbit or the Chronicles of Narnia to Dean, will never have to be yelled at for teaching Dean to hold a gun. 

“Oh, sweetheart,” Ida says gently, and Mary plucks fretfully at the blanket over Dean’s back, adjusting it, feeling the heat of him against her bare breast, and pretends that she’s not close to outright sobbing—everything is fine, obviously. 

“My parents died, two years ago,” she says, and the new nurse—Stacy, her name tag says—makes a small, hurt sound of sympathy. Mary had so many questions— _has_ so many questions, things she never thought to ask Deanna, like if she and Samuel fought more, while Deanna was pregnant, and if that stops once the baby arrives.

Or just—how, exactly, does motherhood work? How can anyone be entrusted with something so infinitely precious and tiny and fragile, and did she feel, holding Mary for the first time, that she would burn down the entire world if someone hurt a single one of Mary’s eyelashes.

She tries not to be jealous about Dean, letting John hold his son for the first time. Her lungs feel like they’re fighting to breathe properly, and she just wants her baby, and to sleep. John looks like he’s been gut-punched, stunned in the face of Dean. Mary is enchanted by that face, but frankly he looks kind of like Yoda, and she’s never going to call him the most beautiful baby. He doesn’t need to be—he’s utterly perfect, and she feels a swell of affection for John when he echoes that thought. 

Dean looks small, cradled against John’s chest, and Mary has the sudden wild thought that they’ve been thrown to the wolves, with no support. John’s mother died a decade ago, and there’s the neighbors, but Mary thinks, as a parade of people come in and out of the room, that they’re absolutely fucked. 

The pediatrician says he looks good, and the nurses keep on checking him over, snatching him carelessly out of her arms or John’s hands, and Mary tries not to scream every time they come in, smiling apologetically. Another elderly nurse comes in and says, 

“Okay, hon, let’s get that baby on the tit.” 

John goes hilariously red, and Mary laughs so hard she starts coughing, and then endures twenty incredibly frustrating minutes of trying to get Dean to do what babies are biologically programmed to do, allegedly. 

“Oh no,” Gladys says, when Mary’s frustration turns towards tearful. “He’s doing really well, honey. He really is—some babies are lazy, and some take a day or so—it’s all normal.” 

Dean latches, and she nurses successfully, and Mary thinks that fine, this might be what breasts are designed to do, but Jesus God it’s painful.

“Oh, it’s going to get worse,” Gladys says cheerfully. "I'll put some breast balm in your home kit. You’re lucky, really. He’s latched easily, and you’ve got the milk.”

She naps, after that, and when she wakes up John isn’t in the room, but the day nurse tells her he’s filling out paperwork and then getting dinner. She falls back to sleep, and when she wakes up there’s a doctor in the room, bent over Dean is in his little plastic bassinet.

She glances at the clock on the bedside table and sees it’s only 5:30, though of course it’s pitch black outside—and snowing, which seems fitting, somehow. 

“How is he?” she asks, lifting up onto her elbows and wincing. She feels bruised all over, and there's something going on in her underwear that she honestly just doesn't want to think about.

The doctor doesn’t respond, seems frozen, his pinky caught in Dean’s tiny fist. He looks—tense. She can’t see his face, but his narrow shoulders are braced like he’s expecting a blow. Dean is making little gurgling noises, his little feet kicking, completely unbothered. 

"Is he okay?" she says, her throat going dry. That burn-the-world feeling is back, welling up under her breastbone, and her finger ache for a gun the way they haven’t in over ten years. “Hey,” she snaps, and he flinches, turns to look at her. His dark hair is a riot on top of his head, and his eyes are sharp and unnerving, as is the still way he holds himself. His face is line by the kind of brutal exhaustion that carves its presence into your skin, and under his lab coat he’s wearing clothes that don’t fit him right, and—and he’s trembling. Vibrating, almost, and she thinks wildly the question isn’t _who_ he is, it’s _what_. 

“What are you?” she forces out, prepared to fling herself across the bed. She’s in a hospital: if she tears something (more), she’s in the best place to do it. 

"I'm an angel of the Lord,” he says, and there's irony there, like he thinks it's funny, somehow. Not that he doesn't believe it, just that something about saying it right now seems funny to him.

"No such thing," she says, frowning. Maybe a shifter—or someone who was religious and then infected by some monster and now believes he’s an angel.

"Demons you believe in, but not angels?" he asks, not moving away from Dean. "Where's your faith?"

"Who says I believe in demons?" she says, too startled to deny it. God, she hasn't had a conversation like this in _years_. 

“You’re a hunter, Mary Campbell. It’s in your blood. Of course you believe in demons.”

“Winchester,” she hisses. “How do you—“

“Angel,” he reminds her, and then, “You made a deal, Mary. In 1973, you made a deal with a demon.” 

“No I didn’t,” she says, completely certain, because no hunter would be stupid enough to make a deal. She glances at the door, but there’s no sign of John, or a nurse. She wonders if that’s the “angel”’s doing, or just her rotten luck. “I wouldn’t.”

He’s infinitely patient as he says, “You told a priest you wanted a normal life, and he promised you’d have it. He told you he’d check in in ten years.” 

She stares up at him, her stomach dropping. “That was—”

“His name is Azazel,” he says, turning his attention back to Dean. She wishes he would stop doing that, and gritting her teeth she gets out of bed, the floor cold under her feet. He doesn’t flinch as she walks towards him. “Your parents tracked him down two years ago, which was unfortunate, because Azazel killed them. And in four years, you’re going to die.” 

“Why,” she says, tugging the bassinet so it’s tucked behind her and the window, lifting her chin to stare up at him. He’s taller than she thought he was, now that she’s in his space.

“You shouldn’t be standing,” he tells her. “You just gave birth.” 

“I remember,” she says. “I was there. Tell me what the demon wants, and why I’m going to die.”

"He's after your children," he says flatly. "Your second-born, actually."

She barks a laugh. She can’t help it, there’s a guy claiming to be an angel telling her not twelve hours after giving birth to her first kid that there’s going to be a second. He isn’t laughing, but he’s not protesting either. He’s just watching her patiently, like he’s done this before. 

“Right, and an angel—“

"Castiel," he says.

“—wants what?" she demands, keeping her voice steady, the way her mother taught her to. Never let anything see how rattled you are; don’t expose a single solitary goddamn weakness.

He’s quiet for a long time, and he drops his eyes from hers, staring down at Dean. It’s not anger, or conflict, that’s eating him up inside, she realizes blankly. It’s _grief_ , the kind that’s all-consuming, that knocked her flat after her parents died, made her stay in bed for a month. He’s wracked with it, it’s swallowing him whole in waves right before her eyes, and Mary doesn’t know if he is an angel, but she aches for him. She’d had John pulling her out of that pit of despair and sucking black, but Castiel looks like a hunter who falls into the job—one job. The job of hunting down whatever hurt him, whatever caused him this much pain. 

“I’ve come back from 2020,” he tells her, shifting abruptly to look her in the eye. “I’m—I have to save—them.” His eyes dart down to Dean when he says that, and for a second she wonders, wildly, if Castiel is Dean’s guardian angel, and he’s wracked with guilt at losing Dean, but then he’s looking at her, his voice broken and nearly pleading, "Will you help me?”

“You’re a nutjob,” she tells him, scooping Dean up and heading back for the bed, taking tender, careful steps. Castiel puts his hand lightly on the small of her back, and everything stops aching quite so much, and when she’s settled she looks back up at him. 

“You couldn’t save him in 2020,” she says after a moment. For all Mary spent her teens railing against being a hunter, it’s deep in her bones. She knew too early that the monsters in the dark could be real, salted her doorsteps and windows out of habit; knew how to shoot more kinds of guns than she could name and knew how to lie, lie, lie. She'd just wanted normal, and she'd been so desperate to have it that apparently she’d made a deal to get it without even noticing. All that training, being the sole heir to the Campbell legacy, all of it had been for nothing, and now apparently she’s supposed to die in four years, and Dean is going to follow her footsteps and die young. Not quite as young, maybe, but 41 isn’t old by any stretch.

Castiel nods, and he looks like her cousins had, reporting to her father after a failed hunt. Back when she wasn’t the only Campbell left. Lost, guilty, and looking for answers. 

Her mother had always said she was her father’s daughter.

"What do we do?" she asks.

“I—“ he starts, looking a little surprised, and she glares at him, adjusting Dean to feed him. 

“We,” she corrects. “You’re in my time, and you need me.”

"You're safe right now," he says.

“I’ll be safe then, too, if we head this thing off. I assume you came back with a plan.” 

Dean flails a hand and they both still, looking down at him. 

“I need to—“ he stops, and then admits, “I’m breaking all the rules.”

Mary grins up at him, conspiratorial. “Did Dean teach you that?” she asks, and he grins back at her, and looks surprised to find that he still can.

“He liked to think so,” he says, and then, “I need to settle. But first—“

He reaches out, and it’s strange, but she feels like she’s momentarily lit from within, and then Dean glows and Mary thinks she’s such a sucker for a sad face.

“They’ll be looking. Trying to influence you,” Castiel tells her. “I’ve warded your bones, and Dean’s.”

She blinks, and starts to say, “ _Who_ will be looking?” but Castiel is gone.

***

It doesn’t even occur to her to tell John about Castiel, mostly because she and John have a quiet, but furious fight about Dean’s name as soon as John steps back in the room with the social security paperwork. John doesn’t understand why she wants Dean to have her family’s name. John thinks that middle names are excessive, but Mary is Mary Hill Campbell, honoring her mother’s family, and she doesn’t actually care what John wants, here. 

“That’s the problem,” he snarls at her tightly, past the point of those slick, patronizing vowels and into the hard clipped consonants of true anger. “He’s named after _your_ mother, now you want to put _your_ family’s name in there—“

“He’s already got your name,” she snaps. “He won’t be Dean Campbell-hyphen-Winchester, it’s a middle name, John, not the fucking end of the world, and since _I’m_ the one who did the majority of the work in his existence—oh, fuck you, I abso _lutely_ did—He’s going to be Dean Campbell Winchester.”

She fills out the forms while John is so angry he can’t speak, and presses the buzzer for her nurse to come collect and file them.

“You’re tired,” John tells her finally. 

She isn’t, but if he has to look at his face for another second she’s going to throw something at him, so she agrees, and he goes home.

It’s unbearable to be the only person in your family left, and Mary thinks that’s part of the problem. John’s father left when he was young, and his mother died a long time ago, and John has said right along that this baby, this _family_ they’re building, that it’s everything. It had been one of the reasons Mary had been happy, because she and John seemed to lock horns a lot, but she thought maybe the baby would change things—that if they were a family, not just a couple, they’d be better. 

But John wants her to be his, and Dean to be his, and Mary loves him, but she hates feeling like some kind of trophy. She has her own hurts, and her own family, and Dean is part of that legacy, too, even if she never wants him to inherit its curses. 

It’s impossible to sleep in the hospital, other babies crying, the sounds of weeping parents or frustrated whispers, crooning lullabies and reverent mothers sharing secrets with the wonders in their arms. 

Dean’s eyes are huge, and he stares at the room, at her face, and Mary smiles down at him and thinks: _you’re going to live to 82, at least_. 

***

When John and Mary started dating in high school, she’d felt like there were two Lawrences. There was the one she grew up in, where people seemed to not quite know who she was, or who were friendly in that polite way where nothing really stuck. John’s Lawrence is full of people who will call across the street to say “Hi!”, who seem to know what’s going on in his life and who wave him off when he tries to pay for things. When she was John Winchester's girl she wasn't Samuel Campbell's daughter, that ornery old bastard who lived on the edge of town with his wife who should have left him years ago, if not for the fact that she was just as much of a crazy. No, she was John Winchester’s girl, so pretty, so kind.

It had been exhilarating to be known, and accepted. She’d been sixteen and so happy. She’d even gone to John’s church, and the priest had smiled and told her she’d have the life she so desperately wanted, and that he’d be around in ten years to check in. She’d laughed and agreed to host him for dinner, and had no idea how much she was agreeing to. She and John married when she was eighteen, just as he signed up for the Marines and headed off to war—there was something sweeping about it, something normal and romantic, part of the national conversation. It turned out, really, that she and John got on best when he was deployed. That should have been a sign, really. The blush of infatuation had worn off, but then—her parents had died on a hunt. Her dad had been hunting a yellow-eyed demon, one he said had made a lot of deals in town a few years earlier, and John had been so good, so supportive, and no one had ever been—careful of her.

No one had ever treated her like she was delicate. She’d grown up with guns in her hands, bedtime horror stories her daily reality. She’d never been treated as breakable, and John’s big hand at the small of her back, his kisses on her forehead, they made her feel cherished, for a while. For a couple of years. 

There was a small part of her that believed that a baby might save them—that Dean still might; that someone else needing them would turn them into their best selves. 

There was another, less small part of her, that had been desperate for the baby because at least the baby would love her. Wouldn’t accuse her of being a frigid bitch, wouldn’t wrap his hands around a beer bottle, obviously longing to have her neck under his hands. 

John had only ever once lashed out at her violently, stumbling drunk and worked up over a Chief’s game, only to find no dinner saved because he’d gone to a bar and she assumed he’d get food there. 

He’d flung a hand out, and Mary had only just stopped herself from breaking his wrist, had slammed his head into the table and left him there, shaking, locking the door to the bathroom and crying, making plans to go. He hadn’t remembered, though, and nothing had ever happened, and Sarah, down the road, had said that Gary came back from the war sometimes blank-eyed, that he’d thrown a chair across the living room and then left to drink the memory of it away, and Mary had been willing to say that maybe that was John’s problem too. That it wasn’t that she and John caught each other’s sharp edges and that he didn’t long to punch her in the teeth the way she longed to punch him in his. 

 

She’d been so glad when she got pregnant, because motherhood would be doing _something_ , at least. Something other than painting walls and cleaning and doing laundry and grocery shopping and staring at the walls and thinking it wouldn’t be terrible, really, if a poltergeist moved in. 

It’s funny, because her mother told her, warned her, that having a kid wouldn’t save a marriage, but in the first blush, in the fraught sleepless nights and trying to remember which side she nursed on last, she and John fight far, far less. There are doctor’s appointments to keep, and the desperation for sleep—John is back to work immediately, and so Mary tries to get up, or make John go sleep downstairs with the TV on, so that he can get a few hours, at least, and the first month is just living from one moment to the next, blindly fumbling. 

When he comes home from work he takes Dean downstairs, or out for a walk, so she can get a nap, and her days feel full. By the time Dean is two months old, though, she hasn’t seen Castiel, and part of her has made its peace with the whole thing: she’ll fight that fight when it comes for her, and there’s no sense missing Dean’s first smile and his throaty giggles because she’s worrying. 

She has screaming nightmares, though, when she does manage to sleep. The strange conviction that when she walks into Dean’s room he won’t be there, that something will snatch him away. There are wards carved into the window sills with one of her paring knives and sealed with blood, protection spells she recites from memory while she’s rocking Dean to sleep, carpets ripped up and Devil’s Traps sketched on the bottom of them with sharpie. She puts holy water in the water she uses to wash the floors, and wonders if there’s a way to bless the boiler. She wonders if Father Coyne (“Call me Jacob!”) would believe her if she just said she was curious.

Mostly she tries to put it out of her mind.

When she walks down the street, people stop her and smile, cooing down at Dean and calling him sweet, a heartbreaker, marveling at his eyes, which are starting to be more green than blue. On the rare night they can afford it, they go out to dinner and Mary watches, bemused, at the parade of people who stop by the table. The entire town has agreed that Dean is the sweetest, happiest, most well-behaved baby they've ever seen, and Dean mostly lives up to the hype, except that he screams bloody murder when anyone other than her or John tries to touch him. John always just laughs, lifting Dean up out of the car seat and rubbing his back. 

"Shy," he says, and everyone smiles and nods and says they're sure he'll grow out of it, grow up to be just like his daddy. Mary wants to know what's wrong with it, being shy. Maybe she wants Dean to stay shy and sweet; maybe she wants to be jealous of his smiles. John seems so pleased, though, to be one of Dean’s favorite people, and it’s something they can share between them: selfish glee that their baby likes them best.

***

Castiel is sitting on her front steps when she gets home Thursday, and Mary hisses at him, “Good! Let the neighbors tell John I’m entertaining strange men!”

“I’m not a man,” Castiel tells her, and Mary throws a package of toilet paper at him on principle. 

“You’re fucking strange, though,” she says, unlocking the door and shoving him inside.

It’s 11:30, which means Dean needs to eat, and then nap, and Mary puts away the groceries that can’t sit out while Dean’s fussing turns into wailing and she says, 

“I know, I know, baby, I’m sorry, just a second.” 

The wailing is reaching fever pitch and Mary is about to say fuck it about the frozen vegetables that she can’t find when suddenly it just stops. 

When she looks, Castiel has unbuckled Dean from the car seat and is cradling him carefully, and Dean is staring up at him, green eyes huge and wide and his mouth open, his tiny arms reaching up. Castiel obligingly shifts him, tucks him up against his shoulder and tilts his head down, inhaling the smell of him the way Mary’s done a million times, reassuring herself with the scent of baby and lotion and the sweetness of breastmilk that lingers. 

It makes something in her stomach clench, because Castiel looks wrecked, and it’s worse, somehow, when Dean reaches for his face, hand batting at Castiel’s nose, his lips, whatever he can get his hand on. There’s something so reverential in Castiel’s face, and Mary is reminded, abruptly, of the angels in the Bible, and how they were God’s soldiers, merciless and terrible, and it’s staggering to see Castiel’s face and know that in all of creation, the thing that could ruin him and incite him to tear apart Heaven and Hell and all of Earth, is Dean.

Mary finds the wayward vegetables and puts them away, frowning at the disaster zone of the freezer and rearranging things from John’s last attempt to forage for himself. 

“I found him,” Castiel says, voice scraped out of his throat, and it’s worse than that—it sounds like he’s carving out his insides and handing them to her. “In Hell. Hundreds of us were sent to find Dean Winchester and bring him out of Hell, but I found him. I had—I had been a good soldier,” he says, confessional. “I had never seen anything like his soul. I gripped him tight and he fought me the whole way, and I raised him, and I remade him. In all of God’s creation, there is nothing I know so well as Dean Winchester.” 

“Even like this?” she asks, voice hushed, and not just because Dean is quiet and she doesn’t want to startle him. There’s nothing he knows so well, maybe, but she thinks he also means _There’s nothing I love so well._

“Even like this,” Castiel says, and presses a kiss to Dean’s forehead before offering him to her. She takes him, and Dean fusses at her because he’s a _traitor_ , and she says, “Yeah, okay, let’s eat,” as she heads into the living room. 

She has Dean settled before Castiel joins her, and she tilts her head at him and says, “John gets home at 7:00 tonight, so you’ve got about seven hours to tell me the whole story.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the delay on this chapter was much longer than i meant for it to be. as some of you know i had some really serious health things that have cleared up, but prevented me from writing. hope you enjoy!

At 3:00 Mary gets the whiskey out from under the cabinet and drinks, hard and steady, for a what feels like five solid minutes. It’s a burn in her throat and chest that she can blame on the alcohol, not on the horror story that Castiel just told her. The horror story that is—will be—was?—fuck— her sons’ lives.

Castiel takes the bottle away from her gently, and instead of replacing the cap, takes a swig for himself. He also carefully replaces the cap and puts the bottle away from himself, as though he doesn’t trust himself not to take too much, the way her father always did. 

The way John never does.

“Heaven and Hell want an apocalypse,” she says slowly, walking back to her chair. She doesn’t reach to take Dean away from Castiel—right now she thinks that the safest place for Dean to be is with Castiel, who has fucked up, but never—never truly abandoned him. Castiel stood by Dean for twelve years, three times as many as she managed, Jesus fucking _Christ_. “And because John and I are Cain’s descendants, which brings up incest issues I don’t even want to think about, Sam and Dean are the most perfect vessels for Lucifer and Michael. 

“Their whole lives are manipulated because your brothers are dicks.” 

“Yes,” Castiel agrees. He tucks Dean up against his shoulder, and she recognizes that instinct, to hold on tight. She wonders how old Dean will be before that starts feeling really substantial—like he can be squeezed without being broken. Four months? Eight? “Some things are already different already—you made a deal with a priest, not Azazel directly. He tricked you the same way he tricked a lot of people in town, because Dean didn’t come back in time to shake things up, because I won’t be sending him.” 

Mary leans back in the chair, closing her eyes. There’s blind comfort there, she thinks—proof that Dean doesn’t get sent back in time by her own past being altered indicating that the future is also…altered. 

“I have a migraine,” she groans.

“Mary.”

“I’m _thinking_ ,” she says. November 2nd, 1983 is the key. If Sam—the child she’s going to have in 1983, in four years—isn’t ever infected with demon blood, he won’t be a perfect _perfect_ vessel for Lucifer, and if she’s alive, none of this is going to go down because she, unlike John, isn’t an _idiot_. 

“What would be really helpful,” she says, forcing her shoulders down from around her ears and sitting up in the chair, “is Colt’s gun.” 

“I’ve been looking,” Castiel says, and Mary scoffs and then opens an eye. He’s staring back at her very solemnly. 

“Are you serious?” she demands. Colt’s gun is like Excalibur, some fantasy weapon, but of course in this new reality where time-traveling angels fuck with the future and destiny, it makes perfect sense that the Colt would be real.

“Dean used it to kill Azazel,” he says, smiling down at Dean, who’s gumming on something. Mary frowns but shakes her head, looking back up at her spackled ceiling. 

“If Dean—“ she starts, and then stops because she has to. It’s insane, is what it all is, and she just presses through because if she keeps trying to _think_ about it this migraine is going to get worse and she’s going to vomit and cry and hide under her covers. She wonders if this is how _civilians_ feel, people who don’t grow up knowing that the things that creep in the dark are real. It’d be easier to swallow it all if it was abstract, but this is her _family`_.

She clears her throat. “If Dean never goes to hell, and we break the last seal before they can break the first, and Dean never breaks the first because he never goes to hell…we win?”

“As far as Sam and I could foresee, yes.” 

Mary nods. Sure, as far as he was able to calculate with her unborn, and as of yet unconceived, son in 2020, this was a great plan.

“Okay. Get me the Colt, then we’ll worry about Lilith.”

***

She doesn’t tell John. She could rationalize it by saying that she’s lied for so long that there’s no sense coming clean, but that’s not it. She can’t even pretend that it is.

John, she knows now, could handle knowing that there are monsters and demons out there. But handling it, and surviving that knowledge are two very different things, and she doesn’t think that John really lived after he found out about the supernatural. That he existed in a weird half-life, consumed with revenge and while the fact that he managed to the boys alive while he was actively hunting isn’t anything to sneeze at, it’s not something worthy of praise, either. Mary comes from a long line of Hunters on both sides, people who put down roots and raised their kids and frankly Castiel’s silences around the subject of John’s parenting are speaking.

She doesn’t tell him, and knows that it’s a choice she’s making with malice of forethought. That ultimately, right now she’s trusting Castiel, an alleged angel of the Lord, more than she trusts her husband. 

John could handle the situation, but the utter banality of their life, and the fact that he seems to want nothing more than this, keep her quiet. She wonders if her father was right; that her relationship with John couldn’t survive being in the life. That to be Mrs. John Winchester she had to fully strip herself of everything that ever made her Mary Campbell, and as soon as Dean was born she didn’t have a choice but to start being a person she’d barely remembered. 

It’s not just the supernatural things, though. It’s the fact that they only have the house because Mary used the money from her parents’ life insurance policies to buy it, so all they pay are taxes and utilities. That should mean that even with only one income they’re set, but John likes going out for beers with the guys on Fridays and stumbling home, throwing filthy boots up on her couch, and what was charming and sort of rough and sweet is now—less so, now that she has a baby who wakes up when the lamp gets knocked over. It’s $30 at the bar on a Friday that’s turned into $150 over the course of Friday and Saturday, plus going out to eat three times a week. She spends the last week of every goddamn month staring at their mortgage and bills, and John walks in the door at 2:00 on a Tuesday because there’s not enough work at the shop and he volunteered to go home. 

He talks about vacations, or renovations to the house and whenever she points out there’s not enough money, he points out that she could always sell her parents’ home. Not that she could get a job, or that he should actually put in 40 hours a week instead of the 25 he averages. No, it’s always about her parents’ house, and that she refuses to sell it, because they both know that every time she says she’s keeping it as an investment or an asset, she’s really saying that she wants some of her own money wrapped up in something he can’t blow through. That she has an escape hatch; that she’s not fully tied to him. 

It is, she’s found, almost impossible to trust someone when you don’t trust them with money.

So she keeps her silence. 

She goes to her parents’ house, sits in her mother’s kitchen and cleans her guns while walking someone named Abel through a standard poltergeist salt-and-burn while rocking Dean’s crib with her toe as he babbles and tries his best to destroy the heirloom knitted blanket she gave him.

She finds herself thinking about conversations she’d had with her mother at this very table, doing just this. 

“There are people like your father,” Deanna had once said. “Who are brought up to the fight, and who never walk away from it. It’s deep under their skin. You’re like that—shh, you can’t help it, you come from both of us, and I’ve got it deep in my bones too. It matters what you do with that though. You help the people who need helping, you look out for your fellow soldiers.” 

Deanna had set the gun down and folded her fingers on the gingham tablecloth. “John Winchester will come home from his war, and he’ll go back to being a civilian. The war won’t stick. It may hurt him, alter him, but it won’t be the same for him. It’s something that’ll happen _to_ him, not something he _is_. And that’s _okay_ , Mary, it really is. But you think real long and hard whether you want to love a man who won’t ever love the war in you.” 

Her mother had been right, of course. The war _is_ in her. It’s deep under her skin, and she feels like her number’s come back up, called up to the front again.

“Can you handle it?” she asks, and Abel says, 

“Yeah, thanks, Campbell. I got it.” 

She hangs up and lifts Dean up. “Mommy just saved a family of five and it’s not even ten in the morning,” she says. “And now we’re going grocery shopping.”

It’s how she fills her days. Hunting by proxy, reaching out to old contacts, scratching off the names of the ones who’ve died and adding new numbers in for those who survived, those who are new. She feels—alive, really. It makes it easier, in some ways, to smile at John the first week of the month, or Saturday morning when he’s hungover. She thinks at him, sometimes, _I gave birth and am going to war against demons, and there’s a family in Missouri that’s still alive this morning because of the advice I gave the hunter on the case—and a little whiskey took you out at the knees?_

But she doesn’t say it, and she keeps her secrets, and her silence, and knows that she’s putting the nails in the coffin of her marriage. 

***

Castiel is MIA, and Mary assumes he’s doing huge, cosmic things, so she works on tracking down the Colt. By April she’s traced it to Colorado, and is now arguing with eight different people about who has it. She’s called the airlines twice to see how expensive it would be to fly out to Colorado and hunt it down herself and wondered how she could sell that to John. In the meantime, she and Rufus Turner have built up a relationship of mutual antagonism.

“Rufus, I don’t care that you think it’s a wendigo, it’s not a wendigo, it’s a pontianak, it’s clearly a pontianak, and that’s why you’re hearing a baby crying. It’s also why only the male victims have their genitals mauled. Burning it isn’t going to make a difference, driving an iron nail into the nape of her neck will make her human, and then you shoot her in the face,” she says, and flinches when Castiel appears out of thin air. 

She should punish him by refusing to let him hold Dean, but Dean is on the verge of fussing, and even though John thinks four months is too young to start accusing your kid of being emotionally manipulative, Mary disagrees. She particularly disagrees when Dean cries through things he doesn’t like—diaper changes, putting on shirts, being put in his playpen for the first five minutes. But, she reasons, as she gestures and Castiel scoops him up, that particular quiet little gasp Dean just made was a prelude to the kind of quiet, fat-teared crying that makes her feel like a failure as a parent.

“Rufus, I’m going to go, call me if you’re not dead and we’ll talk more about how I’m right and you’re a fucking idiot,” she says, hanging the phone up. Dean is smiling and staring soulfully up at Castiel, and Mary sighs. 

“I’m going to get you a bell,” she says. 

“I brought you something,” Castiel says, gesturing to a box with strange etching—wards, she thinks as she frowns at them. 

“You still need to like me best,” she informs her now-smiling son, who just continues to gaze into Castiel’s face with his wide gray-green eyes. “Ugh,” she mutters, and lifts the cover of the box and stares at Samuel Colt’s gun. Five of its thirteen numbered bullets are nestled beside it in worn velvet, and it has the gleaming luster of a gun that’s been well-loved and well-used.

“Oh my God,” she exhales. “Who had it? Is there a body rotting somewhere in Colorado?”

“I didn’t kill Daniel Elkins,” Castiel says, and then adds, “I told him that the army of God had use for it.”

“You’re a goddamn liar,” she laughs. “Wait here for me.” 

She puts the Colt in the box under the bed that holds her wedding dress, because while John likes that she kept it, he doesn’t ever, ever look at it. In all fairness, neither does she.

When she comes back down, Dean is smiling and content, and Castiel is staring at him in that same reverential way, like he’s greedy and desperate to know and reaffirm that Dean is alive, and whole, and safe.

“How’d he die? In 2020?” she asks, and they both still, the question ringing in the air. She hadn’t meant to ask that.

“The first time Dean ever died,” Castiel says, because he never answers any of her questions head-on. She thinks, actually, that he just wants someone else to know the things he knows. That it’s important that _she_ know these things, because Castiel is incredibly isolated and she’s the only friend he has, and she’s also Dean’s mother, and he wants her to be proud of the man her son was.“Was in 2006. He and Sam were on a hunt, and there was a rawhead, a basement with standing water, and a taser. He saved two children, but had a massive heart attack. The doctors gave him, at most, a month to live.” 

“What saved him?”

“An enslaved Reaper. Someone else died so that Dean could live, and Dean was—furious.”

“So…”

“He was supposed to die, then,” Castiel says. “In that way. And in 2020 there was a poltergeist, a basement with standing water, electricity, and a fatal heart attack.” 

Mary closes her eyes and then pushes her hair back. She doesn’t know that Dean, the one who reduced Castiel to a man so desperate he traveled through time, and she never will. He was still her son, though, and for all their schemes it might still be his fate, and it’s wrenching, devastating, to hear it, and more than that, to hear Castiel’s grief. That it’s tempered by the fact that he had sixteen years of borrowed time is cold comfort.

“It won’t be like that,” she says, and her voice sounds strong, sure. Dean is going to grow up, and she’s going to be there, to see him turn five, and ten, and sixteen, and twenty-one. She’s going to be there for college, and his wedding, and she’s going to be there to see her grandchildren, and, if she plays her cards right, her great-grandchildren.

“Who was on the phone?” Castiel asks, visibly rousing himself. 

“Rufus,” she says. “he’s an idiot.” 

“Turner?” Castiel asks, cocking his head. 

“You know him?”

“Of him,” Castiel says. “Is Bobby with him yet?”

“Bobby?” she repeats, thinking. “No, I don’t think he’s mentioned a Bobby. Who is he?”

“A good man,” he says, with a faraway look and a faint smile that crinkles his eyes. She finds herself looking forward to meeting Bobby. 

She meets him eight months later, just after Dean’s first birthday. 

Rufus Turner shows up on her parents’ doorstep, which frankly she should have expected. They’ve been talking for eight months, and she’s pretended to be the FBI for him four times and researched a few cases for him. He’s good people, as her father would say. Solid, does a favor when one’s done for him. Cagey as all hell, but who isn’t.

Mary tucks her gun behind her thigh and says, “How are you still alive, Turner?”

“I’m good, Campbell, I’m just that goddamn good,” Rufus lies, hugging her and stepping inside. On the doorstep, his partner pauses, then extends his hand. 

“Bob—Bobby Singer,” he says. “I’ve heard so much about you, Ms. Campbell.” 

“Call me Mary,” she says, and thinks she should probably also say ‘And it’s _Mrs._ Winchester.’ but she doesn’t, because it’s Castiel’s Bobby, she’s sure of it.

“I don’t get to call you ‘Mary’,” Rufus protests. “Eight months we’ve done twelve jobs together and you’ve always been ‘Campbell.’” 

“I don’t really like you,” she tells him, patting his arm and grinning at Bobby, whose mask of polite regard cracks into warm friendliness. “Come into the kitchen, tell me what the hell you need.”

Dean is playing in the living room, and she can hear him humming—as long as there’s noise, he’s fine. 

Rufus is on the trail of what he suspects is an entire network of vampires. “Like the mob,” he says. Mary sighs and puts on a pot of coffee. They fall into a good groove, until Mary realizes that it’s too quiet. 

“Wait,” she says, cracking her back and getting up.

“What?” Rufus demands, grabbing his gun. “The hell’d Bobby go?”

“Oh put that away,” she says. “It’s not nap-time and my baby, who recently figured out how to walk, is quiet. Last time that happened he overflowed the toilet.” 

“Smart kid.”

“You’ve got no idea.” 

She doesn’t have to go far, just back into the living room, where Dean has his box of crayons and coloring books spread out, and where Bobby is folded, a little awkwardly, at the coffee table. 

Dean is watching avidly, his small hand resting on top of Bobby’s, as Bobby colors.

“We make a _yellow_ sun,” Bobby says, drawing deliberately. 

“Nam-nam,” Dean agrees, nodding firmly and supervising Bobby’s coloring closely. The left corner of Bobby’s mouth is tugged down in his effort not to grin, and he keeps on sneaking looks at Dean. Mary can’t help but like people who like Dean: it’s proof of good taste, and if Dean likes them back, well. Frankly, that’s very nearly a miracle, though he is getting better about not sobbing around strangers. She’s holding out hope that by the time he’s ready for kindergarten he’ll just be quiet, not actively distraught. 

She leans against the wall, just watching them, and Bobby looks up at her, smiling. “I was going to come back and help,” he says. “But I got distracted by more important things.” 

“Mama!” Dean says, beaming at her, and Mary smiles down at him. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” she says. “Bobby—do you—“

“We’re good here,” he says, looking down as Dean takes the yellow crayon and shoves the blue at him. 

“He lost his wife,” Rufus says lowly, when she settles back at the table. “She got possessed and he stabbed her. Knew it wasn’t her, thought he was goin’ crazy or that she was, and by the time I got there the thing in her was still trying to kill him. I sent it back to Hell, but she died. You know how it is, the things keep the bodies going and then the person can’t survive it. Anyway, he burned her body, two months later I get a call from him saying he’s on the trail of something weird.” 

“The local sheriff didn’t look into it?” 

“They’d had a fight, the whole town knew about it. Guess she’d told a few people she was going to go back to her folks’, police never even suspected. That kind of place, you know. You don’t borrow trouble.” 

“You don’t want to say ‘lucky’,” Mary says, and Rufus taps his nose and nods. 

“Anyhow, he’s not a bad partner. ‘Specially on Shabbat.”

Mary raises her eyebrows, and he gives her a look that’s pure innocence. She suspects that while he probably does observe the faith, observing Shabbat is reserved for when he needs to dig a grave and has a partner along. 

Bobby comes out with Dean in his arms, asleep, and asks her quietly where the crib is. Mary leaves Rufus to it to show him, and says, 

“You’re really good with kids. I’m sorry about your wife.” 

“You got a good kid,” he says, ignoring the last bit, the way she expected him to. 

“I do,” she agrees, grinning. He looks at her, with warm brown eyes. “You should visit,” she says impulsively. “When you’re in the area, I mean.” 

“I’d like that,” he says, voice soft, and Mary thinks, _Oh, shit._

***

It’s hard, impossible, really, to keep her marriage going. It’s not even that she felt—something, for Bobby Singer. That was just attraction, and knowing that he was someone safe from her goddamn time-traveling angel. 

No, it’s that maintaining this marriage had been a full time job in and of itself, and that frankly she and John didn’t do themselves a favor by having a kid. Whoever said having kids can save a marriage was full of shit.

“Jesus, Mary!” John is shouting over the sound of Dean’s screams. “You know, you coddle him like this, and he’s gonna be a fucking fairy.” 

Dean’s screams go raspier and louder, and Mary is very aware that Castiel is behind John looking, for the first time, like he could actually be a soldier of God and is very, very willing to smite. 

She wonders, wildly, if Castiel just swapped out his devotion from God to Dean, and how the _fuck_ she’s going to raise a kid under those conditions. 

“He fell, and it’s scary, and he’s a year old, John,” she says, trying to keep her voice level because she doesn’t want Dean to think she’s yelling at him. She has Dean clutched to her, bouncing as she sways back and forth, and Dean doesn’t want to let her look at the lip he just split open because he’s crying too hard. 

She picks up her coat and grabs the keys, John dogging her heels. 

“Where are you going?” he demands. 

“We have to go to the hospital!” she says. “He needs stitches!” 

“It’s a cut, Mary,” he says, reaching for Dean’s bloody chin. Mary grabs his wrist before he makes contact, and _holds_. John flexes his fingers, staring at her, because Mary doesn’t do this. Doesn’t pick fights, doesn’t get physical, but she’s just so—angry. Too angry to pretend she’s not stronger than she looks. 

She lets go and puts Dean into his jacket, and then heads out the door, buckles him into the carseat, and doesn’t look at John, standing in the doorway. 

It wasn’t John’s fault. They’d been having a good night, laughing about Dave at the shop and his constantly tragic lovelife, and Dean had just—overbalanced. One of those things that happens to kids, except that he’d fallen into the heater on the wall, and caught the sharp edge, and John responds to any kind of situation like that by just getting angry and yelling, and Mary. She _has_ a son. 

Castiel is in the backseat, and Mary says, “Can you fix it?” 

He presses a gentle finger to Dean’s lip, and Mary looks to see if there’s any kind of glow, a sense, but there’s nothing. Just Dean’s abrupt hiccup that segues into a quieter whimper, and Mary heads towards I-70 instead of towards the hospital.

She pulls out, merges into traffic, and says, “I can’t. I can’t stay married. I can’t do it.” 

Castiel doesn’t say, “Sam” but he doesn’t have to. Her youngest hangs between them, and the fact that she even thinks of him like that, her youngest, she knows that she’s going to have him. That there is a part of her that loves Sam already, his strength and his fearlessness and his goodness. But the idea of fucking John to get that baby is just repulsive, and she slams her palm against the steering wheel of the impala and exhales through her teeth. 

“You could always reconcile in August of 1981 for a month and poke holes in the condoms, I’ve heard that works.”

Mary is momentarily too appalled to even speak beyond her absolute shock. Finally she croaks, “Heard from _who_?”

“Dean took me to a whorehouse,” Castiel says, and Mary stares at Dean in the rearview mirror. He’s clinging to Castiel’s hand, gumming one of his fingers, and she says,

“This is why a maternal influence is so important.” 

They settle into silence, and Mary just drives. She likes driving at night, when all the cars are white and red lights and gliding over the smooth asphalt. It feels like a kind of freedom, or serenity. 

“This is partially my fault,” Castiel says, abruptly in the passenger seat. 

“Did you push him?” she asks.

“Not that,” he says. “Your marital issues.” 

“I’m not lusting after you, if that’s what you think,” she says. 

“You didn’t like John at first,” he says. “They had to—intervene.” 

Mary forces herself not to look at him, not to say anything. 

“When I found you, I—I branded all of your bones. Protection sigils, they hide you from angels and demons and their surrogates. They protect you from being influenced, but it also removed any influence they had placed on you. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t remember.” 

He goes quiet, and then, “You and John didn’t get along at all, but they needed you to have children. Specifically you two. So they sent a cupid.”

Mary pulls off at the exit with a wrench of the wheel, pulls into unlit parking lot of a diner, and kills the ignition. 

“I’m sorry, what?”

“To make you and John fall in love,” he said, “they sent a Cupid.” 

“So—I never really loved him?” She thinks to that summer, to how she had fallen so abruptly for John, how everything that had been annoying and infuriating had become charming. How it wasn't just her, it had been him, too. The things he’d hated about her he’d suddenly seemed to love, and she hadn’t questioned it, because she’d been too happy. 

But there had been cracks, almost as soon as her parents had died. Little fractures, and then when Dean was born—and Castiel warded them. 

“Oh my god,” she says. “I’m going to throw up.” 

She stumbles out of the car and breathes deeply, staring unseeing at her surroundings. It’s—she feels _violated_ , like she wants to claw at her skin or scream or just cry, and she tries to control her breathing, watching it curl in white huffs in front of her in the cold March air. 

She doesn’t throw up, and when she climbs back into the car Castiel is waiting, and Dean is still asleep. 

“In the time you came from,” she says. “Was I—I don’t know. Happy? Did we have a good marriage?” 

“No,” he says. “The marriage had problems. John left at least twice that I know of, before you died.” 

“I don’t know if that’s comforting,” she admits. It’s March, 1980. She gets pregnant with Sam next August. 

“Can you—next August, can you get a Cupid arrow and give me back John, or maybe, I don’t know, drug us?” she asks. 

“I will look into it,” he promises, and Mary turns the ignition and heads back home. By the time she pulls into the driveway Castiel has vanished, and John is waiting up for her.

“I went to the hospital,” John says. “They said you didn’t show up.” 

“He settled once we were in the car and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I think it split right on a crease, it’s practically healed up,” she says, and John takes Dean, his big hands gentle. Mary wants desperately to love those hands, and the man attached. 

“I was out of line,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that. I just—I worry he’s gonna get picked on.” 

“He’s fifteen months, John,” she says. “He’s a baby, still.” 

“Yeah,” he agrees. 

“I should have stopped and called you,” she offers, an olive branch. He smiles at her, relieved, and says, 

“No harm done.” 

“Put him to bed? I’m going to stay up for a little, read, maybe,” she says. “I feel all shook up.” 

He smiles, and heads upstairs, trying and failing not to be visibly relieved that they’re not going to have to dance around each other awkwardly on their way to bed, and lay beside each other in the dark.

Mary sits at the kitchen table and rests her face in her hands. 

***

Things are calmer after that. She and John reach a kind of truce, and she lets herself relax, a little. 

Which of course is stupid, because the Jehovah’s Witnesses who have been canvassing the street for the last week are, apparently, not Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

“They’re angels,” Castiel says from behind her shoulder abruptly, glaring through the lace curtains. “They don’t actually know what you look like, they know you live around here.” 

“They— _what_?”

“I hid you,” he says. “All of you. They must have checked in and realized they can’t find you. It was eighteen months ago, I’m actually surprised they didn’t look earlier.” 

“I feel like you didn’t think this plan through all the way,” Mary says.

Castiel just gives her a flat look, and then there’s an insistent tapping on the glass of the front door.

“Hi there!” the petite southern girl—angel?—on Mary’s doorstep chirps through the window.

“Don’t answer it,” Castiel says. 

“She knows we’re in here.”

“She doesn’t, actually,” he says. “Because she can’t _sense_ you.”

“She can see me,” Mary argues. “She has eyeballs, and they’re currently trying to burn holes into me.” 

“I will answer the door,” Castiel says. 

“Good, so the angels will know that you time-traveled, branded our bones, and hid us?” she asks, and he blinks. “Go upstairs and sit outside Dean’s room until he wakes up.” 

He goes, if only because he’s hardwired to protect Dean. Mary’s not above exploiting it.

She opens the door. 

“I’m afraid I’m not buying anything today,” she says in her sweetest homemaker voice. The girl on her porch settles onto her feet, tilting her head in that exact way Castiel does sometimes. The sunlight dims, and suddenly the noise of the street is muffled, like she’s hearing it from underwater. 

“Actually I’m looking for my cousin, and I know she lives here, but I just can’t remember what street,” the girl says. 

Mary has three cousins, none of whom look like this girl. 

“Oh, what’s the name?” Mary asks, trying to look sympathetic. “Maybe I know her.” 

“Mary,” the girl says, her voice stretching, vibrating slightly, like a violin holding a note on a bow that’s shredding. “Mary Winchester.” 

Castiel is downstairs, then, and his hand is bleeding. Carefully he’s drawing on her door, tucked out of sight of the girl. Mary spends only a second to wonder how much of a hassle blood is going to be to wash off the paint. 

“Mary Winchester,” Mary repeats, thoughtfully. The light keeps dimming, and she’s aware abruptly that whatever is inside the girl in front of her is enormous, that it’s a giant using a leaf as a mask. 

Castiel shakes his head at her and then slams his hand into the door, and there’s a searing light and the girl is gone. 

Mary closes the door, turns the locks, and says, “What the _fuck_.” 

“I told you,” he says. “I warded you.” 

“Okay,” she agrees. “But you’re going to show me how to do that ward. Let me get my journal.” 

****

Susan Loeb was one of the girls Mary went to school with, and she has a daughter who’s Dean’s age. 

They have a friendly enough relationship. Friendly strangers, who smile when they see each other and ask about their kids and husbands and don’t really interact at all, so it’s strange when Susan touches Mary’s arm in the supermarket with a smile and says, “Why don’t you and Dean come over for a play date? Toby’s on a long business trip, and I really could use some adult company.” 

Mary agrees, wondering if this is some kind of trap, but when she and Dean arrive Susan smiles and has a play area all spread out for Dean to play with Abbie. 

Dean is shy, but picks up one of the rag dolls, and Susan says, “Oh, he’ll be a charmer,” fondly. 

“I made chocolate chip cookies,” Susan announces, putting the small plate between them. It’s pretty, blue flowers painted on the trim, and she sets a glass with ice water and a lemon beside Mary’s elbow on an equally pretty coaster. “I don’t know what kind of cookie you like, but I figured chocolate chip is about as as safe as you can play a thing.” 

Every cookie is the same size, and they’re delicious, and Mary feels a kind of pang that this is one of those things she can’t do. “These are great,” Mary says, and Susan smiles.

“I know,” she says, sitting down in her own chair. “It’s my one joy in life, being better at this than just about everyone. It drives Kathleen crazy. Some days I offer to make her extra, just to watch her try to be all accepting when I know she just wants to claw my face off.” 

Kathleen Strout had been homecoming queen and prom queen in high school, and is now on the PTA, and one of Lawrence’s people-to-know. Michael Strout owns the Buick dealership in town and Kathleen seems to think that means she’s as-good-as the mayoress. 

“Good,” Mary says, and means it, because high school pettiness is hard to overcome when you’re faced with the same people all the time. “Maybe you’ll _actually_ drive her crazy.” 

“That bitch,” Susan agrees, and they clink water glasses. On the blanket, Dean and Abbie are mostly ignoring each other, but contentedly. “He’s sweet,” Susan says. 

“He is,” Mary agrees, because Dean, improbably, is the sweetest kid she’s ever met. “How’s—“

“Mary, I—“ Susan interrupts, and then, “We were never friends.” 

“No,” Mary agrees slowly, putting down her ice water and frowning, wondering wildly if Susan has been possessed by an angel.

“But, I don’t _dislike_ you. I just don’t know you. We could probably be friends,” Susan continues.

“I—yes?” Mary says. 

Susan nods, smiling like Mary just affirmed that they’re the best of friends. 

“And the thing is, I would want to know.”

“Know.”

“You know Toby travels, for work?”

“I—yes,” Mary says. “Susan, I don’t—“

“He stayed in a motel last week, because of the rain, and it was late and I don’t like him driving when he’s tried and the weather is bad, so he stopped. And he saw John with Brenda Hines. Their rooms were next to each other. He said it wasn’t very ambiguous, what they were doing their room. Thin walls.” 

Susan looks a strange combination of furious and guilty, her hand hovering over the arm of her chair like she’d like to reach out to Mary but she’s not sure she’s allowed. 

Mary thinks it makes sense, John being friendly to her. He’s fucking someone else. He’s having an affair. 

“Well, it explains a few things,” she says, and Susan chokes and presses her fingertips to her mouth, trying to contain her laughter. “Well, I just—I mean. He hasn’t even _asked_ , you know. Like he’s not—and he’s been in a _really_ good mood.” 

Susan bursts out laughing. “Mary Campbell,” she laughs, and then, “I mean—Winchester.”

“Under the circumstances, Campbell is fine,” Mary says wryly, picking up her water. She looks at it for a second, then at Susan. “Have anything stronger?”

It turns out that John hasn’t been discreet. Toby didn’t just see him with Brenda, he heard about John and Brenda from a few other people in their part of town. 

“Oh my goodness, and then Missouri Mosley, you know, she lives just up the street from you in that big old house? _She_ was telling Brenda that she should stop what she’s doing. Right in the middle of Macy’s! She’s just telling her that she shouldn’t tangle with that man, because he was married and his wife could shoot the hat off a scarecrow at 500 yards in a stiff wind!” Susan confides, and Mary drags her hand down her face, laughing helplessly. 

“I thought Brenda was going to _pass out_. She was always after John, though. She thought you two would break up, I swear she went into mourning when you got married.” 

“Oh god,” Mary croaks, wiping at her eyes. “I mean, it’s not funny. My life is a disaster.” 

“Oh, honey,” Susan says, all sympathy, and Mary waves her off. 

“No no, I’m resigning myself. And I could shoot her at 500 yards in a stiff wind, so that’s a comfort.” 

“Yes, well. I guess it would be to you,” Susan allows, pouring them each another peach schnapps. “Really, though, Mary—I mean. What are you going to do?”

“Oh, kill him.” Susan gives her a long look, and Mary waves a hand. “I don’t know! I mean, is it terrible if I say that our marriage has been better lately, maybe because he’s having an affair?”

“A little,” Susan admits. “I mean, it’s sad. I’d die if I thought Toby was cheating on me. He’s the love of my life.” She flushes, a little, tucking her dark hair behind her ear even to have admitted it, but when she looks up it’s clear she’s telling the truth. 

“I don’t think John is,” Mary says after a long pause, soft. “I—“ she thinks of Bobby Singer, of how he was with Dean, and how he’d smiled, and how she half-hopes that it’s going to be him on the other end every time the phone rings. “I know he’s not,” she clarifies, and Susan leans forward and grips her hand tightly, and they stay like that, holding hands, watching their kids play, as Mary lets the enormity of what she just admitted, and the things she didn’t admit but _meant,_ sink in. 

Toby Loeb comes home just after lunch, and though he’s all smiles and only a little not-quite-hidden pity, Mary takes Dean home for nap time. 

Which turns out to be just as well, because Castiel is crumpled on the porch, hidden behind the bushes, in a bloody mess.


	4. Chapter 4

Dean starts crying instantly, a hurt sound, the way he cries when he’s overtired, or when he loses his tentative grip on gravity and goes plummeting to the ground and is intercepted on the way down by a table, a wall, one of the toys constantly strewn underfoot. It’s been so strange, such a terrifying part of being a mother. To know that on top of being responsible for turning him into a good man, teaching him how to be a person who can survive whatever world he steps into, she’s also responsible for teaching him those things that seem so basic, like catching himself when he falls. Teaching him how to endure the disappointment of your body’s frailties. 

Mary tucks Dean into her neck, lifts him so his weight is lifted onto her breast as she crouches beside Castiel. 

He looks at her unsteadily, his blue eyes too-dark, pupils blown wide. His vessel is struggling to contain him, and she can almost see it, when she holds his gaze. She can almost see what he truly is, and it makes her heart beat faster, hairs lifting on her arms and the nape of her neck. 

“Get up,” she says lowly, because there isn’t another option, and he didn’t travel through time to die on her porch. “Get up, and get inside.” 

He struggles to his knees, gets one leg under him, a bloody hand gripping the porch rail. Mary unlocks her front door, puts Dean—still screaming—into his playpen, and goes back out to Castiel. She fists her hands into his clothes and hauls him up. His hands shake as they grasp at her, staining the sweet dress she’d worn to Susan’s, and he makes hurt sounds that she ignores, navigating him over the threshold. Behind them, the door swings shut, locks with a click, and Mary doesn’t falter, maneuvers him to the downstairs bathroom, blindly grateful that there’s a shower in there. She lets him collapse into the far corner, and turns the water on. He gasps, a shocked, strangely cold sound as the water starts sluicing over him. He shakes hard enough to send droplets hitting the glass door, but he keeps breathing, and she goes into the kitchen, digs under the sink, past the Pledge and her spare sponges and the WD-40 and mostly-used bottles of Windex because she never consolidates them even though she always means to. The Brillo box is a little damp, but she brings it back into the bathroom and slices through the duct tape, pulling out her surgical thread, the lighter to sterilize the needle, and the hydrogen peroxide. 

“Get undressed,” she says, keeps her voice that steady, low pitch, and he responds to it. His shaking hands fumble and tear at his shirt, strange moments of weakness followed by inhuman strength. Satisfied he _can_ do it, she goes to get Dean, murmuring apologies into his flushed skin, peering past the lace curtains to see if anyone is on the street, watching the house. Dean quiets slowly, and Mary takes him into the bathroom, because she knows Dean is, in some way, crying _for_ Castiel. On his behalf, or because of him, Mary doesn’t know, and doesn’t know if it matters. Castiel looks up at Dean’s teary face and looks devastated, a hand reaching through the haze of steam and something else—something strange and dark and shadowed, pressing against the glass in wordless apology that Dean won’t understand anyway. 

She settles Dean next to the toilet, murmurs nonsense to him. His green eyes are huge and fastened on Castiel, and he says, dubious, “Boo-boo?”

“Yeah, baby,” she says. “Boo-boo.” 

She lays down towels, grabs a clean washcloth, and carefully strips down to her bra and underwear. Making sure Dean is still sitting, and that there isn’t anything immediately disastrous within his grasp, she climbs into the shower and plants her feet on either side of Castiel’s legs. Carefully she crouches down and using her fingers to wipe away the already-scabbed and clotted 

“What did this?” she asks. They look like knife fight wounds, but it’s like the blades were curved, and she can’t think of anything that would work like that. The wounds aren’t even from something like a scimitar—the blade was shorter, and the curve more pronounced.

“Reapers,” he croaks. “I went looking for Death.” 

“I assume Death, as in Four-Horsemen-of-the-Apocalypse Death, and not ‘death’ in the literal sense,” she says, pushing at his shoulder until he lets her see his back. His upper back is excoriated, ribbons of flesh, like whatever was attacking him concentrated all their fury there.

_Wings_ , she thinks. Like they were trying to cut out his wings. It takes a second to make her eyes really focus on it, with the blurred shadows and the truth of the angel underneath those ribbons of skin and muscle peeking through. 

“You’re a fucking idiot,” she says, twisting around and hitting the water off. She wipes her hand and leaves a clear smear on the glass to peer though. Dean’s pulled himself up to a stand, holding the toilet and quiet, so quiet. 

She wonders if he’ll remember this. She wonders if this moment is carving a wound deep somewhere inside him, one that will scar over and change the shape of him, of who he might have been. She didn’t think about these moments, when she picked up the mantle of this war again. She didn’t think about anything but saving him.

Her hands are steady on the needle, and Castiel bows his head as though in prayer. The water on their bodies grows cold, and she grits her teeth against the chill as her skin ripples. Castiel’s skin stays smooth, where it’s not in tatters. In the corner of her eye, the shadows snap violently.

By the time she’s done, Dean has curled up on the towels she laid down and fallen asleep, thumb in his mouth, and she has blood deep in her cuticles, under her nails, in the pores of her skin. Castiel looks like a patchwork quilt, like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster, and he shifts slowly, carefully, looking at her. 

“I need his ring to keep Lucifer’s cage closed,” he says. “Or rather, I need one of the Horsemen’s rings, and Death is the most inclined to give it to me—and the easiest to find.” He closes his eyes, and the fragile skin of his eyelids seems reddish, glowing with some internal light. Mary wraps her hand around his knee, and thinks that if John found them, her in bloodied bra and underwear, Castiel naked and stitched to hell, Dean asleep on the floor of the bathroom, he’d go insane. But there’s nothing about this that’s sexual, and Mary is so, so keenly aware that she’s not in here with a man. Castiel wears a man’s body, but that’s just window dressing. 

When he opens his eyes again his gaze is steadier, bluer. “Death likes Dean. He came for him personally, in the end.” His lips twitch. “His favorite amoeba.” 

Mary will worry about that later—what it could mean, what—what the _fuck_ that could mean. Right now, she needs to get him to bed. “Come on,” she says, standing and wincing when her legs tingle, blood rushing back. “You’re going to sleep upstairs.”

He moves easier, now. He’s like light shining through the seams of a curtain, and he pauses and scoops Dean up. Mary doesn’t argue, she walks behind him with a hand hovering at the small of his back, tucks him into the guest room bed and, after a moment’s consideration, goes and drags Dean’s crib into the room. Castiel is asleep when she gets back in, and Dean snuffles a little, but settles easily. She presses the crib up against the bed, watching Castiel reach out a hand unconsciously, wrapping around one of the slats, and the shadows in the room thicken over them both. 

_Wings_ , she thinks again. 

She strips down in her bathroom, puts on jeans and a tee shirt, shoves her bra and underwear into a trash bag and goes downstairs to do the same to Castiel’s clothes, and then realizes that actually he’s naked up there, so after putting the bag into the bottom of the trash barrel, she goes back upstairs and digs out some of John’s clothes and puts them at the foot of the bed for him. 

By the time she gets back downstairs her calm is starting to fracture, and she’s exhausted at the thought of cleaning up the bathroom, the hardwood floors. Thank Christ they’ve always been too broke to put down nice carpets, but there’s the porch, too, which she’s going to have to hose off. 

When her foot touches the floor, though, she realizes the TV is on, and there’s a man sitting on her sofa, watching Laverne and Shirley, a Chicago-style pizza in front of him with two plates and two glasses of red wine. 

“I thought you might be hungry,” he says, not turning to look at her. She can’t quite place the accent. It sounds almost English, but then it shifts, twists in unexpected ways. “I took the liberty of cleaning up. All of it.” 

Mary thinks of the Colt, tucked up in the taffeta and tulle of her wedding dress, and then of the wards on her house. 

“Thank you,” she says carefully, forcing her exhaustion back down and stepping into the soft light of the television to look at him, careful of the way she’s planting her feet. He’s old, but his hair is jet black, and there’s something about him so distinctly reminiscent of any funeral home director she’s ever met.

He turns slowly, like time is irrelevant, and then stands. She doesn’t see him stand, actually—just one moment he’s sitting, and one moment he’s standing and extending a pale hand to her, but it’s nothing like the frantic movements of a ghost. 

“Hello, Mary Campbell,” he says, and after a moment the skin around his black, black eyes creases, transforms the strange weariness of his face into a softer smile. “I’m delighted to meet you.” 

“Hello, Death,” she says, and takes the hand, which feels paper-thin and somehow impossibly strong at the same time. 

“It’s been a busy day for you,” he says, gesturing to the sofa. “Sit with me.” 

The TV mutes, and Mary sits. 

“This pizza is exceptionally good,” he says, sitting beside her. “Dean is particularly fond of it, though the first time he had it with me he thought I was going to kill him.” He serves her first, and then himself, and adds, “I believe at the time I was offended that he thought so highly of himself. It turned out, of course, that we were both wrong.” 

“How?” she asks, cutting a bite.

“We both should have thought more highly of him. I’m delighted by this prospective change,” he confides, one corner of his mouth lifting, his black eyes sparkling. “Sometimes I am so…weary. I have been alive since the beginning, and I will be the last thing to go. It’s been a long time since I allowed myself a diversion.” 

“I thought you—the lore says you’re locked in a magical coffin 600 deep,” she says, and he chuckles. 

“I am,” he admits. “I’m locked up in that coffin, because if I didn’t let them think that I would have to contend with the hosts of Heaven and Hell and frankly, after several millennia, they become incredibly dull. But,” he says, fastidiously wiping his fingers on the cloth napkin he’s pulled out of somewhere, “I’m also sitting here with you, enjoying pizza. 

“I am not a person, Mary. I am a _thing_. A concept. I am _Death_.” 

He examines his clean fingers, then removes the the ring on his right hand. It’s silver—or, it looks silver. But it gleams, and even in the light of the television she can see it seems white—almost bone white. He offers it to her, and she reaches for it.

“I have conditions,” he says, and she freezes, her fingers curling instinctively from it, in towards her palm. “You must do whatever it takes to keep Lucifer in his cage.” 

“Of course,” she says.

“No, _whatever_ it takes. If Dean’s angel fails, then Sam will be the only person who can stop Lucifer. He will say ‘yes’ to being his vessel, and then jump into the fiery pit.” He pauses, and then shrugs a narrow shoulder. “Of course, that won’t be the end, but then, if you don’t succeed now, it will all go as it once did, and Castiel and Sam will have done all of this for nothing.” He smiles again, wryly. “No pressure.” 

Mary stares at the ring in his hand.

“Whatever it takes,” she says, and uncurls her fingers. He drops the ring into her palm, and it lands heavily, unnaturally still. He drops a silvery chain into her still-open palm, and when she puts it on, the necklace settles just between the hollow of her breasts, and he nods in satisfaction.

The TV unmutes and he says, “I’m really more of a _Golden Girls_ fan, but apparently that’s not on yet.” 

Mary’s about to tell him exactly how sick she is of time-travel comments like that when John walks in the door. 

“Shit,” she hisses, and Death reaches out a hand to pluck the wine glass from her as she stands, feeling inexplicably caught out, and guilty. 

“Who—“ John starts, and his eyes are glassy, which means he wasn’t working late. She wonders if he got a whiskey and then fucked Brenda. If the flush on his cheeks is from sex, not alcohol. 

“I’m Mary’s uncle,” Death says, standing. “I’m sorry we didn’t call, John, and of course I haven’t seen you since the wedding.” 

“Oh,” John says, and reaches out a hand. “Nice to meet you…?”

“Mors Hill,” Death says, icy reproval. “We met. At the wedding.” Mary bites the insides of her cheeks to keep from laughing at the sheer absurdity of this moment.

“Oh, of course, Morris. How’ve you been?” John fumbles, and Mary says, 

“It’s late. Why don’t you go to bed, John.” 

“Be careful on your way up,” Death adds. “My son is asleep, and since he drove he’s very tired. And of course you don’t want to wake the baby.” 

Mary twists and stares at him, and Death ignores her, his gaze fixed on John. In what looks like a trick of the light, the black of his pupils expands, swallows up his entire socket, and John stumbles and says, “Yeah, goodnight.” and rushes up the stairs. 

Death blinks, and his eyes are back to normal, and Mary says, lowly, “Your son?”

“Your pizza is getting cold,” Death replies, sitting back down. “Oh, Laverne,” he sighs at the television. 

*

The following weekend is the most surreal of Mary’s life. Death is excellent with Dean, and Castiel is resentful and long-suffering in his presence, enduring pats on the cheek and admonishments not to be “a wretched brat.” 

The house feels full, and warm, and Mary is so unspeakably _happy_ , in a way she hasn’t been in a long time. This is what home should always feel like, not tense silences and resentments. 

It’s a surprise, then, when not twenty-four hours after the ’59 Cadillac pulls out of the driveway, John doesn’t come home. It’s a surprise, though, she thinks, clutching the phone cord when he finally calls, it shouldn’t be.

He says, angry and accusing, that he just needs space, and time, and hangs up before she can argue—before she can even decide if she wants to. Mary thinks of Sam, and Brenda Hines, and the fact that if she takes him back after this she’s going to be the talk of the town. Susan will be disappointed, but supportive, and this is a fight Mary doesn’t even want to _have_. 

She and Castiel eat crappy pizza on the floor, as Dean wobbles his way through walking between them. Mary wants to scream at John, _This is your son, and you’re MISSING THIS_. 

“Bobby has a lot of cars,” Castiel tells her. “And there is something eating people in Sioux Falls.”

“That’s a six hour drive,” Mary says.

“Not how Bobby drives,” Castiel argues, and Mary sighs and then, before she can chicken out, makes the call. 

_“Singer’s Salvage, do you know what goddamn time it is?”_ Bobby demands. 

“You’ve got something eating people, and I’ve got a couple of days free. You come pick me up, I’ll hunt it with you,” Mary says. 

There’s a long, long pause, and then Bobby says, _“Mary?”_

“Yeah, hi,” she says, her stomach doing swoops. This is ridiculous. She’s twenty-six, and married, and a _mother_ , and she’s—not stupid enough to have a crush on a hunter.

_“I—yeah,”_ he says. _“I mean, I’d love the company. You uh—you and Dean?”_

“If that’s okay,” she says, and doesn’t answer the question he’s not asking, the one about John. 

_“Yeah—I mean, yeah, of course,”_ he says.

John took Dean’s carseat with their only car, but Mary has an angel whose moral compass seems to be Dean, so she has one, liberated from some department store, in her kitchen by the time Bobby shows up in her driveway. 

Dean sleeps the whole way to Sioux Falls, and Bobby lets the radio fill the silence between them, telling her about what he suspects is a shapeshifter steadily working its way through the southwest corner of the city. 

But mostly Mary watches the world pass them by, the near-emptiness of the highway, the way Bobby catches himself cresting 90, glancing at Dean in the back seat and easing back down to 70. Mary smiles every time, tries to keep it secret and quiet, tucked into her shoulder. 

Two dogs greet them happily when they pull in the driveway, hopping around Bobby’s legs affectionately while he swears at them gruffly, unlocking his front door while Mary unbuckles Dean. 

Bobby’s house shows signs of his wife’s hands everywhere, slowly being taken over by books. He doesn’t apologize for the mess, puts Dean down on the floor of the guest room and disappears, only to bring down a crib from somewhere, hand-carved and full of grief and a future laid to waste. She aches for him, thanks him quietly and lays Dean down, aware of the the way Bobby watches, covetous and longing. 

She lays down on cold sheets, and thinks that she could climb into Bobby’s bed. She could strip herself down and take something she wants, the heat of attraction foreign and heady on her skin. She wants Bobby, secure in knowing that this is all her, no cupids or fate involved. In the future Castiel came from, she and Bobby Singer never met. 

She doesn’t. She stays in bed, watching the stars glimmer outside in the cooling October air, listening to Dean breathe. Between one blink and the next she falls asleep.

*

It’s a shapeshifter. 

She hauls out one of her journals and hands it to Bobby, and he goes for one of his lore books, and the door slams open. Rufus glares at them both. 

“That damn thing looked just like me!” he shouts.

Dean, who had been happily playing with his blocks, startles, looks up, and begins crying.

“Rufus I swear to God,” Mary hisses as Dean turns his wide green eyes on her, lifting his arms as fat tears slide down his round cheeks. She picks him up, murmuring reassuringly as Bobby hauls Rufus aside to yell at him some more. 

“—abandoned her and the baby!” Bobby hisses. 

“So you what, gonna play house?” Rufus demands. 

“It ain’t like that! You said you weren’t—“

“Well, I was tied up!”

“Yeah, and she’s the best resource this side of the country!” 

“That’s—That might be true.”

“Damn straight it’s true,” Mary says, sitting back down and putting Dean on her leg. He happily reaches for a book, and Mary sighs and stands back up again. Babies and ancient texts aren’t a great fit. “So it’s a shifter. Does it have a nest, or is it passing through? And what the fuck did you do to make it come after you, Turner?” 

Rufus screws up his face innocently, studying a water stain on Bobby’s ceiling. Bobby scoffs and says something about going to find the family silver to melt down. 

“Turner, you already made my kid cry,” Mary warns.

“It’s a transient,” Rufus relents. “I—me and another guy. We messed up their nest. Didn’t know what they were at first, but I think what we wiped out was the babies. Not that you’d know.” 

“Who were you working with?” 

“Bill Harvelle. He’s in Nebraska.”

“Related to Ellen?” she asks, and he nods. Ellen had called her a few time for help with lore. 

“His wife. He comes by the business through blood, she came in the more normal way.”

“And romance just bloomed.” 

“Seems like. Anyway, far as I can tell she’s not too active, her mother lives with them and is all kinds of crazy. Good people, though.” 

“Good people who the stragglers of this nest might be after?” 

Rufus opens his mouth to reply and then hesitates. “Oh. Shit.” 

“Rufus, I swear to—Nevermind, I’ll call them. Bobby! I’m using your phone!” she calls, and heads into the kitchen. 

The phone rings a few times, and she sighs, cocking her head to the side in exasperation as Dean reaches out to play with the cord. 

Nobody ever picks up when it’s important, she thinks. It’s like some kind of rule of the universe, and of course the Harvelles don’t have an answering machine. She hangs up, then lifts the phone and dials again, tucking it between her cheek and shoulder. 

In the silver of the phone’s cradle she can see Rufus behind her, and she turns, slices the small silver knife she had in her bra across his throat. He stares at her, eyes glinting the same yellow glint she caught in the reflection a moment ago, and the thing wearing Rufus’s skin convulses through a few other people before disintegrating. 

Bobby says, “What the fuck, Mary.” 

“Uh-oh?” Dean offers, staring at the corpse. Mary shoves him into Bobby’s slack arms as the phone picks up.

_“Hello?”_ Ellen asks from the other end of the line. 

“Hi Ellen, this is Mary Campbell,” Mary says, making a face at the goo on her jeans. She doubts that’s going to wash off. “Listen, is Bill home? He would have done a hunt with Rufus Turner recently: shifters.” 

_“No,”_ Ellen says. _“I mean, he went on the hunt, but he’s not back yet. Do I need to come up there?”_

“No,” Mary says. “No, I’ve got Bobby Singer here, we’ll take care of it, I’ll make Bill give you a call when I find him. If he does come home, though, before you hear from me, make sure it’s him. We just had one here in the house pretending to be Rufus.” 

_“You all right?”_ Ellen asks. 

“We’re fine. Just be careful.”

_“I hear you.”_

“What are we going to do with Dean, though?” Bobby asks when she hangs up, and Mary looks at him. It could be just a coincidence, that he cried when the shifter walked in.

“Bring him,” she says.

*

Ultimately, the nest is easy to get rid of, and Bill Harvelle looks sheepish about having been caught, and then terrified of having to call his wife to tell her he was caught, which Mary thinks is how it ought to be. 

Honestly, she stayed in the car with Dean for most of it. She was hardly involved at all, unless you counted the moment she’d driven through the side of the barn.

“I’m so glad I didn’t like that car,” Bobby reflects philosophically. 

Rufus seems torn between being angry that they let something that looked like him into the house, and angry that she sliced its throat without really interrogating it. 

“What if it had _really been me_? What if it’d been an _illusion_ or you’d gotten something in your eye? Shit, woman, you can’t slice people up without doing a little question-asking first!” 

They spend Monday afternoon at Bobby’s, Mary poking through his library and matching his list of contacts against hers while he and Dean sit on the floor and play. The dogs are curled around them and Dean laughing every time Bobby builds up a tower of books, matchboxes, and an old Coke can, only for Dean to knock it back down. 

It’s sweet, and nothing Dean has ever done with John. Bobby seems to have endless patience, racing to see how high he can build something before Dean knocks it over, and Mary can’t help but think of running around the yard with her dad, or playing monopoly for days. 

Her father only ever left for the job, and her parents were happy together, and they both loved her, and she wants that for Dean. 

She just doesn’t know if she owes it to John, maybe—maybe to try to let him reclaim the future they were supposed to have. 

Bobby and Karen never got that opportunity, to have a family. Maybe John needed this time away, to reboot after being yanked out of love with her, the Cupid’s influence broken and then having a kid, and having no explanation for any of that, just knowing that his wife had pulled away and—

Just because it was fake doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be real. 

***

John comes home the third week of June, looking subdued and tired, but sober.

“You bought a car,” he says. 

“My uncle bought me a car,” she corrects, because it’s such a convenient excuse, instead of ‘Bobby wouldn’t let me leave until I accepted a car’. “I didn’t know if you were coming back.”

He flinches at that, and Mary thinks, _Good_. Because he was gone for two weeks, and she had no way to get around town. But she’s trying not to be angry. 

“Dean missed you,” she offers, and he flinches a little at that, too. “He’s napping, but I’m sure he’d be happy if you’d get him when he wakes up.” 

 

The happiness lasts for a the whole span from Thanksgiving to Dean’s second birthday. 

There are no serious hunts, there aren’t any disasters, John works a normal schedule and comes home and spends time with Dean and there are no hints that he’s seeing someone else and she thinks that maybe this was what they needed. To step back and re-center themselves. To figure out who they are without the angelic influence and try to fit those people together. 

She thinks that until the first week of February, when Susan Loeb invites them over for a play date. 

“Brenda went to the clinic,” Susan says flatly. “She had it taken care of. She said he hasn’t seen her since she told him she wasn’t keeping it. He didn’t go with her, and Toby saw him with some new woman—a nurse.” 

Mary stares at her. She’s not sure—which emotion she’s supposed to feel right now. Mostly she just wants to throw up. Or lay down. Or back her car over her husband’s head. 

“You—when did she tell you that?” she asks. 

“She lost her job, because she’d missed so much work,” Susan says. “She was working at the Post Office, and we got talking and then she started crying.” Susan shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t like when people cry, it makes me feel very sorry for them and then I get sucked into their lives and next thing I know it’s three hours later and I haven’t even mailed my letters.

“For what it’s worth she feels terrible.” 

“It’s not worth a hell of a lot,” Mary says flatly. She looks instinctively over at Dean, who’s gnawing on a cardboard book. 

Susan’s lips twitch and she looks at the children too, her face sympathetic. “I won’t tell you we’re told to forgive. I don’t think you put much stock in it.” 

There was a knock on the door. “It’s probably the Jehovah’s Witnesses again,” Susan groans. “Speaking of forgiveness. What part of “Jewish” is hard for them?”

“The part that doesn’t have Jesus,” Mary says, and Susan laughs and opens the door.

“Hello, Susan,” the woman says, and Mary stands up quickly, the hair on her neck standing up. “Have you accepted the love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ into your heart today?”

Susan slants Mary a pained look. “No thank you,” she says, and starts to shut the door, but the man flings out his hand. 

“Oh, one of the Chosen People,” he says, smiling, his lips stretching over his teeth. “We’re looking for Mary Campbell.”

“Mary Winchester,” the woman corrects. “We’re her cousins.” 

“She wasn’t home? Maybe she’s at the store.” 

Mary crouches and spider-walks over to the door, slicing the top of her calf and sticking her fingers into the blood welling up, thinking regretfully that she’ll have to wear jeans for the next few weeks and that it’s good that John doesn’t touch her anymore, because this would be hard to explain. Though not as hard as a deliberate cut across the palm: that shit was amateur hour. Carefully she draws the sigil Castiel taught her on Susan’s door. 

Susan is still trying to shut the door, but the man is insisting, and in the other room, Dean starts to cry. 

“Is that your child?” the woman asks, and there’s something else in her voice, or maybe—maybe someone else. A multitude speaking from one throat. 

“Yes,” Susan says immediately. “Go away so I can see what’s wrong.” 

“Susan L—“ the man starts, and Mary stands up, nudging Susan out of the way. 

“I’m Mary,” she says. “Hi.” 

Susan frowns at her, and Mary gestures pleadingly towards the kids. 

The two angels stare at her, impossibly still, and then the one wearing the man smiles, skin stretching grotesquely. 

They wheel around, and Mary slams the door shut. The light flares, and Susan comes running back into the hall. 

“What happened?” she demands, gripping Mary’s shoulders and peering out past the curtains on her door. Her grip is firm, but she’s trembling, and Mary thinks of her mother telling her that it was unkind of them to pull civilians into their wars. That they did what they did to keep people like Susan Loeb safe, and happy, and to give them a chance to live out their lives to the fullest. “I called the police.”

“I just—slammed the door on them,” Mary says, swallowing down the urge to apologize. “They tried to grab me, I don’t—“

The police are already on the case, apparently. 

They come to the house, take her statement, and Mary plays the dumb housewife. She looks at Castiel, who’s cleaning his blade and sitting on the floor with Dean.

“I need to leave,” she says. 

Castiel looks at her with his pale blue eyes. “Yes.”


End file.
